Men Behaving Badly

By MARGARET TALBOT

Published: October 13, 2002

When you work at a car dealership, you spend a lot of time standing around, but that does not mean you relax. How can you, with the manager constantly hovering over you and the strains of ''We Will Rock You'' or some other sales-meeting anthem ricocheting around your brain? You've got to be on, you've got to be pumped, you've got to be ready to pursue a car that noses into the lot, and then be standing right there, hand extended, when the wary customer steps out. Body language is vital. Philip Reed, a writer who last year posted a diary on the Internet about his stint as a car salesman, described a seminar in which he was taught how to shake hands -- with a ''slight pulling motion'' that represents ''the beginning of your control over the customer.'' Reed observed that the car salesmen he worked with shook hands with one another often, too, practicing for ''Mr. Customer'' and ''staying loose.'' There was also a lot of ''high-fiving, fist-bumping, back-slapping and arm-squeezing'' and during slow periods a lot of ''tie-pulling, wrestling and shadowboxing.''

And a fair amount of free-floating, adrenalized aggression. ''At car dealerships, there's a lot of downtime,'' says Jean Clickner, a lawyer with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Pittsburgh. ''You work 12-hour days, and there's a lot of waiting around for customers. At the same time, there's big money to be made and a lot of pressure to make a deal, and when you're the one selling cars, you feel you can do no wrong.'' Clickner, who has represented several aggrieved car salesmen, sums up the problem this way: ''Sometimes the guys get slap-happy.'' Car dealerships, in other words, are one of those American workplaces where masculinity and job performance are straightforwardly equated, which makes them fun for some men and not at all for others.

Consider what happened, back in the late 90's, at Burt Chevrolet in Denver, where two swaggering sales managers named Terry Franks and Jay Gaylord held sway for a time, and in unreconstructed style. It was apparently their habit, for example, to address salesmen as ''little girls'' or ''whores.'' They would upbraid a guy by asking if he used tampons or tease him by saying that he had ''to squat'' when he urinated. The managers publicly derided struggling salesmen as ''queers'' or ''steers'' -- because ''steers try; bulls get the job done.'' To motivate the troops during sales meetings, they showed raunchy video clips, including one depicting a bull stepping on the genitals of a rodeo cowboy. Gaylord signaled his boredom with what a subordinate was saying to him by simulating masturbation while the employee talked. He grabbed at male employees' genitals, sometimes making contact, sometimes not, but mainly (or so it seemed to the men who got used to jumping out of his way or even running when they saw him) hoping to make them flinch.

The reason we know about any of these antics is that 10 of the salesmen at Burt Chevrolet ultimately decided to register their objections. And to do so they chose what might seem to be an unusual means. With the help of the E.E.O.C., they filed a sexual-harassment lawsuit charging the car dealership with creating a hostile environment that discriminated against them as men. It was, in their case, an effective weapon: two years ago, the E.E.O.C. won a $500,000 settlement (and a promise to implement mandatory sexual-harassment training) from Burt Chevrolet, which had already fired the two managers in question.

The idea that by being raunchy, men might be discriminating against other men is not an intuitive one. Indeed, not all of the guys involved in the Burt Chevrolet suit realized ''that this was discrimination at first,'' says Mia Bitterman, one of the E.E.O.C. lawyers who handled the case. ''But they certainly did not enjoy being afraid to bend over at the water fountain because they didn't know what was coming. And they were certainly embarrassed that anything like this could have happened to them.''

Most people asked to envision a sexual-harassment complaint from a man would probably think of ''Disclosure''-like scenarios starring rapacious female bosses in pinstriped Armani. Maybe, when reminded that men can file sexual-harassment suits against other men, they might think of a gay boss coming on to a subordinate. Both kinds of cases do occur (the latter more often than the former), but judging from law journals and court documents, they do not represent the typical harassment claim brought by men. A more common case involves heterosexual men, often in blue-collar and service-industry jobs, who object to the ''hostile environment'' created by the behavior of other heterosexual men.

Since 1992 the percentage of sexual-harassment charges filed by men with the E.E.O.C. and state agencies has been increasing steadily, to 13.7 percent in 2001, from 9.1 percent in 1992. A total of 2,120 such cases were filed last year. (The most common kind of harassment case by far still involves a woman accusing a male co-worker or supervisor.) Men's claims of harassment often center on what is considered ''horseplay,'' or what Bruce McMoran, an employment lawyer in Tinton Falls, N.J., describes as ''bullying, hazing, adolescent kinds of behavior.'' Sexual-harassment lawsuits are not obvious or straightforward or even particularly sensible solutions to the problem of men treating one another badly at work (or expecting other men to like their crude jokes), but they seem to be the solution we have hit upon.